Distributed computing environments are becoming a very popular mechanism for publishing information of various types. In such an environment, a network of several different types of computers is used in order to share access to information. Certain computers, known as servers, contain databases and other repositories of information. Other computers in the network, known as clients, act as interfaces for the human users to retrieve and display information.
One particularly well known example of a distributed computing environment is the World Wide Web. In this environment, the Web server computers presently in use typically store data files, or so-called Web pages, in a format known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Web pages are transferred between Web servers and clients using a communication protocol known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTML permits the Web servers, or sites, to handle container or document files which reference other files of varying formats. Using HTML, a given Web page may include content information in various formats. An HTML format file may also refer to other files, by including reference information, known as a Uniform Reference Locator (URL), which specifies the location of remote Web servers at which the other files may be located.
Certain Web servers, such as those maintained by on-line service providers such as AMERICA ONLINE ®(AOL®) or Microsoft Network (MSN®), are an increasingly popular way for people to obtain information of interest on the World Wide Web. (AMERICA ONLINE®and AOL® are registered trademarks of America Online, Inc. of Dulles, Virginia. MSN® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Washington). Indeed, certain Web sites host search engines such as AltaVista®, Yahoo®, and InfoSeek™and thus are exclusively devoted to guiding users through the Web. (AltaVista™ is a trademark of AltaVista, Overture Services, Inc. of Pasadena, California; Yahoo™ is a trademark of Yahoo!Inc. of Sunnyvale, California; and InfoSeek™ is a trademark of InfoSeek Corporation of Sunnyvale, California). These sites are so popular that their operators provide their services free of charge to users of the Web, and support themselves typically by selling advertising space on their Web pages. Thus, an advertiser, for example, a running shoe manufacturer, may contract with a search service such as Yahoo, or an on-line service, such as AOL®, to periodically present its ads on their Web pages in much the same manner that commercials are traditionally purchased from television broadcasters.
Certain tools are presently in use by the providers of such services and advertisers, typically in order to calculate advertising rates. For example, the Web servers at such sites may count the number of times that the Web page containing the advertisement is displayed.
Alternatively, an advertiser may count the number of visits that its own Web page receives as a result of linking from the original Web page advertisement, i.e., the number of times that users request the URL of the advertiser's Web site via the original Web page on which the advertisement was displayed. In the usual model of user interaction with a Web page, this occurs whenever the user clicks (i.e., selects by a mouse input device) on a hypertext item. In many instances, objects such as graphical images or “GIFs” may be clicked on to activate the hypertext links.
Advertisers, however, would like not only to count a number of “impressions,” or how many times their advertisement is seen, but also to find a way to track how effective their ads are in attracting consumers' interest in their products.
Advertisers would also like to find a way to more precisely gauge a user's interest in a product, as well as to entice those users who are casually browsing through the World Wide Web, without actually requiring users to download the advertiser's Web page. In this manner, interest in a particular product or promotion could be gauged directly from data surrounding the initial presentation of the advertisement.